Posts Tagged ‘existentialism’

On of my favorite movies, and definitely my favorite Peter Faulk movie, who died Thursday, is the existentialist German film Der Himmel über Berlin (The Sky Over Berlin), for which the US release was given the title Wings Of Desire. Von Wim Wnders’ film takes place in a post-war Berlin that is watched over by angels, invisible to all but children, who try to bring comfort to the city’s inhabitants. One of the angels, Daniel, falls in love with a trapeze artist and longs to become mortal. Hollywood remade the film as City of Angels, starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Found at YouTube from DHB1959.

I had a chance to watch Richard Linklater‘s animated film Waking Life the other day. Though I love his rotoscoping style and I felt the film was oddly compelling, it felt tedious too. The movie is basically about the main character running into one person after another, all of whom espouse their various world views to him, be it about…

The Dreamers

Or Buddhist Philosophy

Language, Evolution, Nothing New & Time

I stuck with the movie because of the animation and frankly because it
was different, but the philosophizing began to wear on me. I was like,
where’s the action? In the following scene, the main character is hit by a car and it introduces the theme of the movie, dreams within dreams. I thought, yeah, these these whoa! concepts is the kind of stuff you’d talk about if you were stoned.

And it struck me: Of course! This movie was designed to be watched while on acid. Seriously. The shifting colors and backgrounds, the philosophical parade, even the Tosca Tango Orchestra score lent themselves to the creation of a "freak out" movie. After I figured that out, I could watch the rest of the film with fascination rather than tedium: